Fords That Could Save Ford Now

For an American automaker, selling a car in the U.S. that was designed for overseas markets is what is known in football as the gadget play. It's the fumblerooski, the Statue of Liberty, the off-the-wall trick call that is highly risky, likely to end in disaster, but may just catch the competition with its drawers dropped. Most times it has been tried — such as in 1984 with the European Ford XR4Ti (it was called a Merkur here) and in 2003 with the Australian-built Pontiac GTO — the results reflected the odds against that play.

Then there was Toyota's Bb, a Japanese-market oldster that tapped a whole new fan base when it reappeared in America as the Scion xB in 2003. GM is about to call its own gadget play by stocking Saturn's shelves with European Opels. We think a little savoir-vivre is just what Saturn needs.

Ford needs something, too. Badly. Bribing America to buy Fords lost the House of Henry $1.6 billion in 2005 even as market share continued to wither. Ford subsequently said it would padlock 14 factories and pink-slip 30,000 workers, gutting one-quarter of its carmaking capacity. In March, a Connecticut dealership that sold Fords for 48 years announced it will switch to Lexus.

We went across the oceans east and west to sniff out Ford's foreign lineup. In distant lands we found a few gems that might just catch everyone by surprise and get Ford a needed touchdown, if it only has the gumption to call the play.

Would you visit a Ford dealer if it sold a budget BMW that hosted five adults and their airport luggage, laid rubber with the rear tires and rode gently on all four, turned sharply into corners and drifted its tail coming out, gave you the choice of a six-speed manual or German-designed six-speed automatic, and came in all the colors of the rainbow and a few found only in a toxic dump?

To borrow an Aussie phrase, we bet the Ford Falcon would stick out in America like dogs' balls. And that's a good thing.

Enduring the 15-hour flight to Melbourne is like jumping into America's parallel reality. In Melbourne — or "Mel-boring" to Sydneysiders — the suburbs of red-brick cottages on one-third-acre lots have the ambience of Anytown, U.S.A. Australians drive their kids to school, shop in fluorescent-lit supermarkets, keep the A/C on high, and eat too much partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. If we're going to find America's next sweetheart car, this is the place.

We're headed into the grassy flatlands southwest of Melbourne — in fact, to some of the very locations where the Australian cops-versus-bikers flick Mad Max launched Mel Gibson's career and committed some of filmography's best vehicle carnage to celluloid — in two versions of Ford's 2006 Falcon. The XR6 Turbo and the V-8-powered FPV GT are the top tire smokers of this big, lovable lineup of rear-drive family sedans (and wagons and "utes," for the platform is used in all three).

They have supportive buckets providing heaps of head- and legroom, well-executed interiors lined in matte-finish soft plastics and precision-guided buttons, and sizzling jolts of power headed to the rear where jolting power belongs. Somehow, Australia has become the place to find the quintessential American muscle sedan.

The Falcon has always swung by a shoestring. In a tiny market of about one million new cars per year, Ford sold 53,080 Falcons last year, a fragile number that has somehow weathered a flood of imports and a few colossal mistakes. Many Australians never forgave Ford for axing the optional V-8 in 1983 (it came back in 1991). A disastrous 1998 redesign that Aussies dubbed the "cockroach" followed Ford's introduction of the Taurus to Australia — one of several failed attempts to replace the Falcon with a U.S.- or European-sourced car. Buyers, including most police agencies, left for GM's Holden in droves.

Instead of folding the Falcon, Ford retooled it. Athletic proportions and a pugnacious face returned some Aussie swagger to the Falcon in 2004. The 2006 Falcon BF (so designated after the local habit of assigning new models a two-letter code name) also comes with a wide choice of performance upgrades and a fresh palate of blazing colors. This year, uplevel Falcons also shed their old four-speed automatics for a new ZF 6HP26 six-speed — a state-of-the-art autobox fitted to BMWs and to a seven-seat sport-utility called the Ford Territory, launched into the Australian market on the Falcon platform in 2005.

Make Research

*AccuPayment estimates payments under various scenarios for budgeting and informational purposes only. AccuPayment does not state credit or lease terms that are available from a creditor or lessor, and AccuPayment is not an offer or promotion of a credit or lease transaction.